


An End, Once And For All

by Antipode



Series: I Was Lost Without You [16]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, F/F, Implied/Referenced Mind Control, Indoctrination Theory (Mass Effect), Mass Effect 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-03
Updated: 2021-02-03
Packaged: 2021-03-14 12:20:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29170986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Antipode/pseuds/Antipode
Summary: At the end of the war, Shepard comes face to face with the Catalyst, and makes a decision that changes the galaxy forever.
Relationships: Female Shepard/Liara T'Soni
Series: I Was Lost Without You [16]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1937521
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	An End, Once And For All

“Get up.”

The voice thundered, whispered in Shepard’s ear. It was a titanic effort to lift her head, let alone her battered body; nonetheless, with a snarl and gritted teeth she pushed herself off the cold ground. Blood and perspiration poured off her, skin cracked and split, fused and scorched armor plates dug painfully into her. She found herself staring into the eyes of a human child.

“What..?”

“Does this form not please you?” The child tilted his head. It seemed to shimmer, to shift, between faces, between forms, sometimes here and sometimes not. For a moment, it was the child she had seen when the Reapers hit Vancouver, a lifetime ago. Then it was a young girl, a girl she had played with in the shade of a lemon tree when she herself was a child. Then a boy in a draub jumpsuit, marked with the forbidding insignia of the BAaT program. It seemed at once a tiny, frail thing and a towering presence; dwarfing her and swallowed by her shadow. A flanged voice howled and purred and snarled and cooed.

“Who… what are you?”

The child’s image _fluttered_ , and where a human boy had regarded her cautiously a moment ago, an asari child bounced merrily. Her dimpled, freckled cheeks split in a smile. Green eyes peered at her, curiously.

“Perhaps this is more to your comfort?”

_Marriage, old age, and lots of little blue children?_

“Stop that,” Shepard hissed, her blood thundering in her ears. Icy pinpricks tickled the back of her skull, and the steel and concrete floor parted at her fingers like butter. “ _Now_.”

“As you wish.” The boy from Vancouver again. The tone was mild, mocking. He continued to stare.

Shepard struggled to unsteady feet, glancing around. They were in a massive circular chamber, like an observation deck, though it was nowhere she was familiar with on the Citadel. If the view from where she'd killed The Illusive Man and died with Anderson was good, this was spectacular - a breathtaking three hundred and sixty degree panorama of carnage and debris, of attack ships on fire in the light of a waning sun, of magnetohydrodynamic beams glittering in the darkness between destroyer-class Reapers' curled tendrils. She watched for a moment as her last alliance of the galaxy fought and bled and died all around her before tearing her gaze away. Light pulsed in the center of the chamber, a vast conduit of energy that doubtlessly ran through the Crucible, the Citadel, all the way down to Earth below. Consoles hummed and clicked all around her.

_Some sort of control center_ , she mused.

"Some sort of control center," the Child agreed. She whirled on him, on his insufferably smug face. "Yes, Shepard, I can see your thoughts. I am only here because you are here. In this place, we are one."

"Who - _what_ \- are you?" she demanded.

"I am the Catalyst," the child pronounced with infinite self-assurance. "You are here to begin the Cycle anew again."

"The hell I am," Shepard snarled. "I'm here to put an end to the Reapers, once and for all."

"'Reapers,'" the Catalyst mocked. "A label created by the Protheans to give voice to their destruction. What they - and you - choose to call them is irrelevant. They are merely a solution."

“A solution?” Shepard coughed. “A solution to what?”

The Catalyst loomed over her, a titanic shadow. “Chaos. We impose Order on the Chaos of organic existence.”

She glared upwards, resolute, a mainsail flapping valiantly in the face of a hurricane. “ _You_ control the Reapers, don’t you.”

“They are my solution,” the Catalyst repeated. “The creators will always rebel against their creators. The result is conflict. Destruction. Chaos. It is inevitable.”

“There is a war happening _right now_ ,” she hissed, pointing. Behind them both, silent in the chill void, they watched as a turian dreadnought cracked in half, torn asunder by a tongue of molten fire. The flash of the mass effect core cooking off was bright enough to sear the retinas even thousands of kilometers away. Shepard tried not to think about how many lives were disappearing before her eyes, how many lives across the galaxy were being “harvested” every minute, every second. Just a solution to a math equation, eons old. “We’re dying by the _millions_!”

“Billions,” the Catalyst corrected. “We harvest your bodies, your knowledge, your resources. Your creations. We preserve them, for eternity, to be reborn as a new ‘Reaper.’ Like a cleansing fire, we _restore_ balance, so that new life can once again flourish.”

“Like hell,” Shepard snarled. “You’re making the galaxy a graveyard and calling it ‘peace.’ I’m gonna destroy you and every-”

“You cannot,” the Catalyst thundered; a mountain, his voice an avalanche. It dropped to a whisper, silken and ripe with promise. “We are infinite. There is no power in the galaxy that you or any of those before you could possess that could oppose us. This is the end of your Cycle, Shepard.”

There was a twinge, and her strength faltered. Stifling a cry, she took a knee, glanced down to where the blood was pouring more freely now from the shattered armor, the bodysuit burned and fused to her tortured flesh. Her lungs burned. Her shoulders howled. _Liara… I can’t hold on much longer. I’m sorry…_

“You cannot save everyone,” the Catalyst murmured, not ungently, and it was Liara’s face that stared down at her, those clear blue eyes like pools of liquid moonlight, that half-smile she reserved just for her. Shepard’s heart ached, her hands twitched, hungry for her touch. She longed to fling herself into her lover’s arms, to crush herself against her breast, to weep, to finally rest. “But you can save a few, for the duration of their limited organic existence. We have allowed this to your predecessors. All you need do is complete the Cycle, and seize control of your destiny.”

“What… are you talking about?” she whispered, hoarsely.

“Control.” The Liara/Catalyst paced around her, hands folded. She looked like she was delivering a lecture on Prothean civilization. Shepard loved and hated it.

“With each passing Cycle, we become slightly more efficient. The memetic virus you know as ‘Indoctrination,’ for example, has allowed us to reduce the time it takes for us to complete each Cycle by hundreds of years. So much unnecessary suffering, averted.” Liara/Catalyst knelt down, her hands slipping over Shepards. They passed right through her, sending a tingle of electricity rippling up her arms. “Over the last few Cycles, we have advanced this theory further. Through more precise applications of force - we could end this war, sooner. A willing guide, to control our fleets, would allow us to seek out and harvest the last remnants of advanced life. All of this - this conflict, this destruction, this chaos…” She/it swept her arms out, seeming to encompass the entire galaxy. “We could end this, here, now. You, Shepard, could end this. Here. Now.”

Liara/Catalyst rose, leaving Shepard to stumble and nearly fall, deprived of even the illusion of support. When she turned, it was Anderson who stared down at her: his uniform crisp, his craggy eyes twinkling in a fatherly way. “You could control the Reapers. Finish the Cycle.” His voice was a tired rumble, war-weary, a soft tremor. “Give those you love the peace of living out their natural lives, and give the galaxy the dignity of a merciful end. You cannot save them all, Shepard. The Cycle _will_ continue. But you can ensure that the suffering of a galaxy is brought to an end.”

“Control,” Shepard wheezed. She glanced around at the thrumming consoles, at the pulsating conduit of energy. Understanding flooded through her, washing away her pain, her fatigue. “So the Illusive Man was right.”

“No,” Anderson/Catalyst corrected gently. “He could never have controlled us. Because we were already controlling him. You, however… You have proven resilient. You could do what he could not. Control the Reapers. End the war.”

She blinked. Garrus twitched his mandibles at her in what she’d come to recognize as a smile, his scared face like a life preserver in an unsteady sea. “It’s that brutal calculus again, Shepard,” he drawled in his flanged, two-toned voice. “The lives of everyone in the galaxy, weighed against the lives of everyone who will ever be.” He cocked his head, quizzically. “You were born for this, Shepard. This is what you were meant to do.”

“You’ve always been able to see the big picture, Skipper,” Ashley cajoled, “make the tough choice.” She was taller than Shepard remembered, her hair longer. She looked… healthy, happy. An Ashley Williams that had lived past Virmire, had maybe settled down, raised a family. Lived her life to her fullest. “Take Control, Skip. You’re the only one who can.”

“Has to be you,” Mordin chattered. The diminutive salarian strutted back and forth, impatient even in death, in simulacra. “Someone else might get it wrong.”

“You can do it, Billie,” Kaidan urged. “Take control.”

“Take control, Shepard.”

“Control.”

“Control…”

“Assuming Direct Control.”

_Control._

A splash of ice flooded over her, like a shotgun blast to the chest. Her eyes snapped open. The Catalyst stood over her; Kaidan, Mordin, Ashley, Garrus, Anderson, Liara. The child. _Her_ child. All of them, and none of them. Formless, amorphous. Tempting, taunting, seducing. _Beguiling_ . And above it all, above _them_ all, a cuttlefish profile, sleek and black and forbidding, a malefic blot on the inky void. Six glowing arachnid eyes glared down upon her.

Harbinger.

“Oh, you’re _good_ ,” Shepard spat, clenched teeth and bloody lips.

“You are resilient,” the Catalyst hissed. It was not complimentary this time. “You fight against inevitability. Dust struggling against cosmic winds. This is the _end_ , Shepard. You will embrace us… or you will embrace your own destruction.”

She said nothing for a moment; just knelt there, taking comfort from the cool of the metal beneath her fingers, from the slight chill in the air. It felt like years since she’d just been able to catch her breath. Around her, the remnants of Sword and Shield Fleet fought, faltered. She knew she couldn’t change that now, couldn’t help them. It was like a mountain had slipped from her shoulders. She felt… light. Assured. She knew what she had to do.

“Embrace destruction…” Shepard said slowly. She looked around at the command center, at the thrumming consoles, at the conduit of energy. At the Catalyst.

The grip of the pistol was cool and reassuring in her hand. Its weight was familiar. Her calloused palm slid easily over the frame, over the grip. Her finger toyed with the trigger.

“When you encounter something you cannot destroy, you instead destroy yourself,” the Catalyst mocked. “This is the end, Shepard.”

“This is the end,” she agreed, standing. “I was just thinking… This whole time, we thought the Catalyst was the weapon. But it was another lie, another method of control. The collected genius of a thousand Cycles, dropped in your lap. A way to end your Cycles quicker, through Indoctrination. Through control. It’d be a masterstroke, _perfect_.” She coughed, unable to hide the smile spreading across her scarred, scorched face. “Except…”

Something very similar to doubt passed fleetingly across the Catalyst’s face. “Except?”

“Except you really _did_ think you could speed up the Cycle by having me direct the Reaper fleet, didn’t you? Everything was a lie, a feint, to tempt me into surrendering control. Everything up to the point where you were _so damned certain_ I’d be Indoctrinated - “ she let out a wheezing cough, steadying herself with a hand on a knee against the laughter that sent daggers through her broken bones. “ - you were _so damn sure_ , you really linked up your entire fucking fleet to one single command node?”

Her green eyes danced with hilarity, with scarcely-contained fury. “So arrogant, you could almost be organic. Almost.” She brought the pistol up and it thundered in her hand. A console exploded in a shower of red and gold and white. The Catalyst flickered. Its child-like face remained impassive.

"This will not end the way you hope."

"Won't it?" Her lips twisted. The pistol roared in her hand again, and another console disappeared in a coruscating halo of flame. The deck shuddered beneath her feet. Out in the black, she _felt_ the Reapers turn, turn away from Sword and Shield and Earth, turn to what was happening on the Citadel. To where their plan was coming undone.

"You cannot win, Shepard." There was an audible note of uncertainty in the Catalyst's voice. "You seek to destroy us, but will only destroy yourself. We are eternal."

"Then why do you sound so scared?" she jeered, bringing her pistol up to sight the massive central console, the one hunched over the conduit of energy like a giant metal spider.

"This will be your end," the Catalyst promised. "Not ours. We will find a way to persist, as we always have. Even should you win a minor victory here, today, you will not survive to enjoy it. Everything you are will be lost. Our work will continue. The Cycle cannot be broken."

The gun felt weightless in her hand. Her wounds, her fatigue, her pain, had all slipped away. There was a lightness to her, a relief, an acceptance. Her finger caressed the trigger like a lover's touch.

"Liara," Shepard whispered. "I know I promised I'd always come back to you, but… I don't know if I can keep that. I love you, Liara T'Soni. I love you, with my whole heart, forever. And I promise I'll be waiting for you, on the other end of whatever's out there." Her voice cracked. "I love you, Bluebird."

"I love you, Sybilla," a voice whispered. Not Catalyst - Liara, Liara slipping an arm around her waist, Liara running her hand up Shepard's arm, Liara resting her crest in the crook of Shepard's neck. Liara, sliding her fingers around Shepard's, around the gun, around the trigger. "I love you. I am yours."

The gun cracked.

There was a terrible white light.

There was a terrible red light.

_“We will find another way,”_ a sepulchural voice promised, as the universe faded, crumbled around her, but she barely heard it. Her last thoughts were of a seabreeze-cool touch, of liquid blue eyes, of soft purple lips.

“I love you, Sybilla. I am yours.”

There was a terrible silence.

And then she let the light claim her.

**Author's Note:**

> A brief 'Before The Devil Knows You're Dead/I Was Lost Without You'-canon fic on the ending of Mass Effect 3, with the premise: what if the Control ending was the final Reaper ploy? What if it was another attempt to control Shepard, like they had done with the Illusive Man?


End file.
